AZTEC, N.M. — The land is parched, the fields are
withering and thousands of the nation’s horses are being left to fend for
themselves on the dried range, abandoned by people who can no longer afford to
feed them.
They have been dropping dead in the Navajo
reservation in the Southwest, where neighbors are battling neighbors and
livestock for water, an inherently scant resource on tribal land. They have been
found stumbling through state parks in Missouri, in backyards and along country
roads in Illinois, and among ranch herds in Texas where they do not belong.
Some are taken to rescue farms or foster homes —
lifelines that are also buckling under the pressure of the nation’s worst
drought in half a century, which has pushed the price of grain and hay needed to
feed the animals beyond the reach of many families already struggling in the
tight economy.
And still the drought rages on. The most recent
federal assessment is that
parts of at least 33 states, mostly in the West and the Midwest, are
experiencing drought conditions that are severe or worse. It is affecting 87
percent of the land dedicated to growing corn, 63 percent of the land for hay
and 72 percent of the land used for cattle.
With water tables falling, fields are crusting and
cracking, creeks are running dry. Water holes first shrink, then vanish
altogether. And dozens of wildfires are consuming forests and grassland across
the West.
While precise figures are hard to come by, rough
estimates from the
Unwanted Horse Coalition, an
alliance of equine organizations based in Washington, puts the number of
unwanted horses — those given up on by their owners for whatever reasons — at
170,000 to 180,000 nationwide, said Ericka Caslin, the group’s director.
Many more could be out there, though. The Navajos,
for instance, have no tally on the number of feral horses on their land; a $2
million effort to count and round them up was vetoed by the tribe’s president
because of the cost.
Here, in this speck of a city in northern New
Mexico, just outside Navajo territory, Debbie Coburn has been scrambling to
enlist volunteers and raise money to feed, clean and care for three times as
many abandoned horses as she had in her rescue farm,
Four Corners Equine Rescue,
through all of last year.
She gets up almost every day to find messages in her
computer from people whose horses are in desperate need of help. One recent
morning, a woman writing on behalf of her elderly parents who live just east of
Albuquerque said, “They have scraped by every week to purchase a bale of hay for
their horse, but they just can’t do it anymore.”
At $8 to $12 for a bale of roughly 60 pounds, enough
to feed a riding horse for maybe three days, hay already costs five times what
it did 10 years ago, Ms. Coburn said. This summer’s anemic harvest has spurred
competition for a limited supply among ranchers big and small, from nearby
cities and also from out of state. And as a rule, the price of hay goes up in
the cold months; it doubled last winter, when the drought’s devastating effects
first began to sprout.
“This winter, to be quite blunt, scares the hell out
of me,” Ms. Coburn said as she walked across the corrals where the horses are
kept, some of them in improvised pens enclosed not by steel barriers, but by
electric fence. (The horses have arrived faster than she has been able to make
room for them.)
“At this point,” she added, “it’s just too late for
rain alone to solve our problems.”
Tony Pecho, the president of
Illinois Horse Rescue of Will County,
some 50 miles south of Chicago, has been trying to get horses adopted straight
from the homes of the people who call to say they can no longer keep them. There
is no money to bring them all to his farm, he said. And while calls for
abandoned horses were rare in years past, this year they are the most frequent,
he said, sometimes coming from places as far as four hours away.
Mr. Pecho has been
asking
for donations, of money as well as hay, on Facebook. On Saturday, Connie
Hendrix, the president of the
Missouri Forget-Me-Not Horse Rescue
and Sanctuary in Linn Creek, hosted a fund-raising ice cream social and pie
auction at a church, and she plans a golf tournament and silent auction next
month, just to feed the horses she already has.
Last week, Ms. Hendrix picked up a mare running in
the woods behind a subdivision in a city 120 miles south of her facility,
thirsty, malnourished and with an injured eye. Last Monday, she said, she got a
call from a sheriff’s deputy asking if she could take in seven scrawny horses,
three belonging to someone who is unemployed and the other four to an elderly
man on disability. Neither, Ms. Hendrix said, could afford to keep the animals
fed.
She is not sure if she can, either. “I don’t know if
we’re going to be able to find hay or afford hay to take in that many,” she
said.
There is little logic to the hay market. Ms.
Hendrix’s rescue gets its hay from Tennessee, while the rescue in Illinois
brings it in from northern Wisconsin. Jennifer Williams, the executive director
of the
Bluebonnet Equine Humane Society, a
network of foster homes for horses in Texas, said she gets it from wherever she
can.
Ms. Coburn said she could still find New Mexico hay
for her horses, but competition from out-of-state cattle ranchers is stiff. Big
trucks that roll in empty leave packed to the brim, bound for places like Texas
and Kentucky.
“My challenge now is to set as many bales aside as I
can,” she said, “but that’s hard when you’re the little guy.”
At the
Navajo reservation, where much
of the once green grass is gone, leaving behind only sand, sheep herders have
taken to bringing their animals to eat the scraps of hay that are left behind
after bales are sold in open-air markets. Feral horses, free-roaming animals
that once were domesticated, have been jumping over fences to eat the weeds that
grow by the side of the road.
Forage “has shriveled and died on the range,”
Kimberly Johnson, the acting supervisor of the tribe’s grazing management
program, said from the headquarters of the Navajo Nation’s agriculture
department in Window Rock, Ariz., near the New Mexico border. Ms. Johnson said
that only 30 percent of the tribe’s livestock owners care for their animals on a
daily basis, based on an informal survey this year.
So the horses have been searching for water wherever
they can: in mills and troughs meant to supply the families that live around
them, as well as the animals they own, and in lakes the drought has turned into
puddles.
Stallions fight one another for food and water,
their bites drawing flesh and blood. Atop a mesa near Many Farms, Ariz., in the
heart of Navajo territory, horses were stomping the ground one recent afternoon,
as if trying to draw water from a pond that is now just cracked dirt. Tribal
rangers said carcasses dot the arid landscape.
Horses are sacred animals to the Navajos; they
symbolize prosperity and the beauty of the Navajo way of life, Ms. Johnson said.
She and her colleagues have found themselves in an awkward spot, caught between
tribe members who want the feral horses away from their water and out of their
land and others who would rather the horses be left alone.
Roundups are being carried out almost every day, all
across the reservation. The horses are sold, at least some of them destined for
slaughter in Mexico. One morning in Cornfields, Ariz., on the western edge of
the reservation, a woman tried to keep the feral horses from being penned in her
corral, cursing and screaming at the men who had rounded them up at her
grandson’s request.
Ms. Johnson watched it unfold from afar.
“What do we do?” she asked. “Do we leave them out
to die of hunger and thirst?”
